The people included in PFE are the majority of the people who appear in the
documentary editions of the Founding Fathers that have been digitized to date. This
first edition includes the Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Alexander Hamilton, George
Washington, Dolley Madison, and Benjamin Rush Papers. The aim of PFE is to include a
record for every person who has been identified and listed in the indexes by these projects.

Are the records complete?

Some records will be incomplete because automated processes of text extraction are imperfect and content has been digitized subsequent to text extraction. Work is ongoing to create fuller records with more data that will be reflected in a future editions.

Why aren't all of the Founding Fathers projects and volumes included?

Only the volumes that were digitized at the time PFE started are included.

Where do the facts come from?

The facts come from the biographical statements in the documentary editions and are supplemented by staff research.

How do I know the source of a specific fact?

We do not tie each fact to each source. Users can consult the biographical statement where many of the facts come from, as well as all of the online sources used to confirm the source of factual information. All sources are cited in the record.

What sources do you use?

We use online web-accessible sources all the time but some are subscription-based so may not be visible to all users. Examples of subscription based sources are Early American Newspapers, a product of Readex.

What do you do when you have conflicting facts?

This often happens with life dates. We usually go with the most frequently cited value and we also try to corroborate our information with primary sources whenever possible.

Why are there so few slaves?

In this first edition, we only include people who were correspondents of a Founding Fathers. This means that very few slaves are included because they rarely wrote or received letters from a Founding Father. We hope to redress this absence in the second edition in which we will include every person included in all of the indexes in the volumes.

What is a documentary edition?

The Papers of the Founding Fathers established the model for modern documentary editions which include all of the letters to and all the letters from these men. The editorial projects search repositories all over the world to find these documents and publish each document with annotation to explain the documents and biographical information to give some context for the people.

What if I have more information on a person I find in PFE?

We welcome your contributions and provide a feedback form for users. Just follow the instructions there to submit your updates or corrections.

The collection, selection, and publication of the correspondence of great (and not so
great) Americans has a history nearly as old as the nation's. Volumes of letters began
appearing by the early nineteenth century, including those authored by obscure as well
as by famous men. As Thomas Jefferson once said, "The letters of a person, especially
of one whose business has been chiefly transacted by letters, form the only full and
genuine journal of his life."

The enterprise of publishing collections of letters changed, however, in 1943. That
year the Thomas Jefferson Bicentennial Commission decided to provide for a new kind of
edition: one that would be scholarly and complete, that would run to tens of volumes
rather than one or two, and that would be supplemented with annotations and editorial
essays. Only thus, the commission decided, could the life of the author of the
Declaration of Independence be opened up to scholars, students, teachers, and members
of the general public—to the American people. The first volume appeared in 1950.

This project spawned others, and in so doing transformed the work of documentary
editing in the field of history. The papers of the great Founding Fathers—James
Madison, George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, the Adams family, and Benjamin
Franklin—began to take shape. So did editions of men and women of lesser reputation
and slighter status, including Robert Morris, Aaron Burr, John Marshall, Dolley
Madison, Benjamin Rush, and Eliza Lucas Pinckney. Some, like those of Hamilton and
Rush, are long completed. Others, such as the papers of Jefferson himself, continue to
be worked on to this day. The product of all this labor has been a trove of
magnificent scholarship, valued not only for the wide-ranging and meticulously
transcribed letters themselves, but also for the way in which their contents have been
researched and explored.

After more than a half century of work, this vital national project has been
transformed by the revolution in digital publishing. All of the papers of the Founding
Fathers, once simply lined up book by book on rows of shelves in homes and libraries,
will be available online through the National Archives at the request of the U.S.
Congress and through Rotunda, the digital imprint of the University of Virginia Press,
which has also created born-digital editions of the papers of other historical figures
such as Eliza Lucas Pinckney and Dolley Madison. The Founding Fathers period has
entered the electronic age.

People of the Founding Era(PFE) is both a product and a byproduct of this revolution in communications.
The project addresses the issue not simply of how we distribute information, but of
the tools we bring to bear in the analysis of that information. It is a cliché (and
indeed incorrect) to say that books are linear while websites are not; after all, a
book, and especially a book of letters, can be read in an entirely nonlinear fashion;
pick up a volume and go to its index. But where electronic publications really differ
is through the ways that new digital tools can structure our approach to and
experience of the work.

Consequences of this revolution include the creation of new models of content and
changes in scholarly conventions relating to paratexts. Given the right
structure—employing databases and tagging—publishers and scholars can slice and dice
information in many ways: they can aggregate and they can segregate; and they can—with
the help of human intervention—make sure this is all done in ways that are consistent
and that lead to approachable and simply visualized results. This revolution in
communications has opened up many possibilities not only for documentary editing but
for using the materials from those editions in new and exciting ways.

A Prosopographical Approach

The goal of People of the Founding Era is twofold: one is biographical; the
other is prosopographical. These important and complementary approaches allow the user
to discover a complex and rich set of offerings.

Biography

The biographical information that appears in People of the Founding Era is
taken from the annotations and editorial apparatus created by the editors of the
Founding Fathers and other authoritative editions. Information from numerous editions
has been gathered and the biographical information aggregated into a biographical
glossary of the Founding era. Readers will, for example, find various short
biographies of the poet-diplomat Joel Barlow and the lawyer-statesman Richard Rush
culled from different editions. PFE has brought together and presented these as
a group so that users have decades' worth of research at their fingertips. Some
subjects profiled are well-known individuals who can be found in the Dictionary of
American Biography, such as Barlow or Rush. Sometimes they will be middling
merchants and bankers, or county-level farmers, or local newspaper owners, men and
women who were midlevel county citizens, neither members of the elite nor the poor and
illiterate. Sometimes they are simple soldiers, such as John Belfour, or a slave, such
as Matilda, a domestic servant who belonged to George Washington. These are people who
will never be found in the Dictionary of American Biography.

As a biographical resource, then, PFE will be invaluable to scholars,
students, teachers, and members of the general public as they explore historical sites
and works (which often offer but glancing references to individuals without providing
more full information or context). PFE will aid genealogists searching for
family members. And PFE will allow the scholar and writer to discover more than
was ever before possible about the people who wander in and out of their documents.
For example, for someone writing about James Madison or Orange County, Virginia, or
studying the slave trade in Virginia, the information that a low-level county official
named James G. Blakey, a farmer and innkeeper who lived on the fringe of Madison's
social world, was—among his many occupations—a slave picker may provide important
context.

Prosopography

If one goal is biographical, the other is prosopographical. Prosopography is the
study of groups—collective biography—and dates back to the early days of the
professionalization of history in the late nineteenth century, with roots in the
eighteenth-century encyclopedists. The word itself is from the Greek prosopon,
or character, and graphy, or writing.

Much of the early prosopographical work was done in Germany on Roman history. One of
the shining stars of the early movement for prosopography as encyclopedia was a German
classicist named Friedrich Münzer, a Jew born in 1868 who converted to Lutheranism and
died in 1942 at Theresienstadt. Rather than focus on the movers and shakers of the
Roman world, the great men who stride through historical narrative, Münzer
concentrated on hundreds of lesser people, working out family relationships as well as
patterns of office holding, marriage, and naming conventions. The goal—and Münzer was
only one of several such scholars—was to construct an accurate picture of how the
Roman republic actually functioned, both socially and politically. Ronald Syme
(1903–1989), a New Zealander who settled in Britain and taught classics and history at
Oxford, publishing his greatest work, The Roman Revolution, in 1939, was deeply
indebted to Münzer and the earlier generation of German scholars in his interpretation
of Roman politics studied as collective rather than individual activity. Another great
historian of the mid-twentieth century was Lewis Bernstein Namier (1888–1960), a Jew
who left central Europe before World War I and spent most of his academic career at
the University of Manchester. Namier looked to prosopography, rather than to one or
two outstanding leaders, to explain great events. Instead of focusing on political
parties and their ideologies, Namier committed himself to studying the individuals who
made up the British Parliament, arguing that the party itself, whether Tory or Whig,
was not simply an institution but a compilation of local interests and shifting
alliances. The way to understand history was through collective biography rather than
through focus on the great man or institution.

Prosopography, then, is a method of historical inquiry that studies collections of
biographical material about people connected by family, friendship, patronage,
commerce, voluntary associations, and religion, or associated by date or place.

In the United States, Charles Beard, focusing on economic relationships between the
founders, in 1913 published An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the
United States, using a rough form of prosopography. In the 1960s, U.S.
historians turned their attention to social history—or history from the bottom up.
American historians such as Stephen Thernstrom used a prosopographical approach to
examine poverty and mobility in his Poverty and Progress: Social Mobility in a
Nineteenth Century City, a study of Newburyport, Massachusetts, first published
in 1964. Among historians, the term became well known in 1971 when the British
historian Lawrence Stone wrote an essay published in Daedalus defining the term
as part of the "new social history." It continues to be employed. As recently as 2001,
Edward J. Balleisen identified his methodology of collective biography (albeit without
using the term prosopography) in Navigating Failure, his study of "503
bankrupts whose commercial careers constitute the heart of this study."

Recently, there has been a rebirth of interest in prosopography because of the power
of computer analysis and the ways in which databases can generate new ways of
examining large sets of data. Several projects harness the power of population studies
and collective biography through the World Wide Web, such as PASE, or the
Prosopography of Anglo-Saxon England and The Prosopography of the
Byzantine World, both out of King's College London.

People of the Founding Era thus attempts to marry two different approaches to
history, biographical and prosopographical. The goal has been to pursue this quest
through the analytic power of the computer, using databases and other tools to
generate new ways to look at large sets of data.

An Overview of PFE

The creation of People of the Founding Era was made possible by the
digitization of the editions of the Founding Fathers by the University of Virginia's
digital imprint, Rotunda. Beginning with the Papers of George Washington in 2007, Rotunda has made available online over 250 volumes of Founding Fathers content. By aggregating from
this digital resource all of the biographical content for a given person and presenting it to the user as a
single and unique "record," PFE
isolates relevant, informative text from references to people of the same name and
simply passing mentions.

PFE culls the biographical statements from the annotations of the papers of John Adams, Alexander Hamilton, Thomas
Jefferson, James and Dolley Madison, Eliza Lucas Pinckney, Harriott Pinckney Horry, Benjamin Rush, and George
Washington. Biographical information was also included from Index of Virginia Printing, The Geography of Slavery
in Virginia, and the Creating a New Federal Government project. PFE includes biographies for a sum total
of 75,197 people, of whom 64554 were
men and 10602 were women. In terms of occupations, 3399 were in the military, 1717
were politicians at some point in their lives, 3715 were merchants, 2073 were lawyers,
1255 were physicians, 878 were writers, 6564 were slaves, and 715 were planters. Some
biographical entries are detailed; others consist of little more than a mention. (More
subjects and a greater range of prosopographical and visualization tools will be added
in subsequent versions.)

While PFE's biographies are aggregated from the biographical work found in the editions listed above,
the same procedures were not used in creating the material for our prosopographies. It is important to understand,
therefore, that although biographical statements appear as found in the original annotations, additional research
has been conducted and new data added to expand the prosopographical depth of this publication. Data such as
birth and death dates, places of birth and death, dates of marriage, and data relating to children and occupations
have been incorporated into the cumulative data about these 75,197 people.

PFE does not constitute the re-creation of an entire world. Nor does it even
provide a statistical sample. A Roman historian such as Ronald Syme could claim that
in writing about the transformation of state and society in Rome between 60 bce and 14
ce, "emphasis is laid, however, not upon the personality and acts of Augustus, but
upon his adherents and partisans." He followed the lives and actions and deeds of
many, if not most, of those adherents and partisans. Edward Balleisen in his 2001 book
used a set of 503 companies that had gone bankrupt in 1841–43; his evidence is
restricted to information about a subset of companies, and he was able to identify and
research that entire subset. Prosopographers such as Namier and Beard attempted to
examine a whole, complete, world of people. They tried not to work with averages or
percentages but to consider everyone. Indeed, reading the works of Lewis Namier is a
bit like entering the world Anthony Trollope created in his Palliser novels. A writer,
Trollope invented the dialogue and gossip that accompanied the imagined parliamentary
maneuverings, but Namier also must have been able to imagine the unrecorded
whisperings of the past from what his incredibly granular research about his
population—and what he could read about their parliamentary activities—told him.

Scholars and students should remember, therefore, that although PFE covers over 75,000 people, we do not
know what percentage of women, or of those born in 1775, this population constitutes. PFE must be read as providing a sense of the
period rather than a statistical whole. Relevant questions to consider might include,
How many people were born in Ireland, who were they, what did they accomplish, where
did they live, and how did they make a living? Is there a sense of community, or of
change in that community over time? What does PFE reveal about migration
patterns and how they changed? People of the Founding Era, again, follows a
prosopographical approach. It is not intended to offer up a collected biography of any
specific set of people who lived during the Founding Era. Rather, PFE attempts
to pull together a combination of narrative and data that will become a critical tool
for understanding these years and the people who inhabited that world.

Methodology

PFE's methodology relies on computer, or automated, processes whenever
possible, but relies on human analytic work to a great extent as well. The very first
step of the project is to use machine-aided text extraction to identify and locate the
relevant biographical text from each edition, using cues provided by the print
editions' indexes. Next, the data resulting from the text extraction is assessed:
Records from different sources about a single individual are merged into a single
unique person record, referred to here as the creation of a name authority
record. Additionally, records are split apart for different people of the same name, a
process referred to here as deduplication.

Creating Unique Name Authority Records

As with a back-of-the-book index, the aim of PFE is to ensure that people with
identical names are uniquely distinguished. Take the following example:

Allan, John (1747–1805)

Allan, John (of Frederick County)

Providing the finer-grained detail in parentheses allows users to identify the John
Allan they are a looking for, or simply alerts them to the fact that information is
provided for two John Allans.

A book's index functions as a name-authority system for the people mentioned in the
book. Similarly, in a documentary edition that runs across many volumes, all names are
ideally expressed the same way from one volume to the next. However, names are not
consistently expressed from one documentary edition to another (from the Washington
Papers to the Adams Papers, for example). Thus, PFE is designed to unify all of
the records that come from the many sources for a unique person, and it assigns the
most commonly used and most complete name to that record. At the same time, all
alternative names, such as pseudonyms and nicknames, are tied to the main record. As
with any name authority system, the objective is to point all versions of a name in
use to a single record.

PFE derives its authority from the editions themselves in addition to the
other authoritative works on which the additional PFE research relies.
PFE is not intended to act as a name authority standard in the same way that
the Library of Congress applies its name authority standard, one that establishes and
shares its guidelines for the creation of library cataloging records. However, at some
point, PFE records could be linked to outside name authority systems such as
the Library of Congress's MAchine Readable Cataloging standard (MARC) or Virtual
International Authority File (VIAF), making it more useful to users and relevant
across other external content.

Deduplication

The process of machine-aided text extraction is very effective for extracting text
and for making exact matches of like names, but automated processes are not able to
discern when seemingly identical records (or persons with identical names) are
mistakenly combined—machines will frequently make matches that are not true matches.
Humans are thus required in such cases to assess the collected biographical
narratives, supplemented with additional research, in order to determine when one
person record should be split into multiple records. This process of deduplication is
ongoing, particularly as each new population of names is merged into the original
population.

Biographical Content

Each person record in PFE contains the aggregated biographical references
extracted from the documentary editions, providing as much of the original contextual
information as possible to the user. As a further aid to users, each record provides
links directly into the document in which the original content is located so the user
can see the document in its entirety, including all of the annotation. PFE
retains the extracted text verbatim from the original edition. When external resources are consulted in order to provide data in a person record, a Documents Compass Citation is provided. This is the case when we supplement what is known about a person from the documents in the documentary editions, or when we do not have any information from the documentary editions.

Structured Data: Prosopographical

While the biographical information is narrative in format, the prosopographical data
is quite the opposite. It is structured. The data are controlled so that users get
consistent and meaningful search results. This is a familiar concept to users of
relational databases in which every field has controlled values from which users must
select when creating new records or searching through them. In the same way,
PFE has restrictions in place for the expression and creation of all the
structured data. All of the data in the prosopography side of the project follows the
established categories and vocabularies, or taxonomies, in use.

PFE created some of this structured data at the outset of the project during
machine-aided extraction. For example, all records were assigned a gender value of
male as a default value. Other values such as surname and forename were extracted
automatically based on heuristic models (e.g., predictable textual patterns) that are
found in the source material; that is, the formulaic expression of names in the index
as Last name, First name. (The initial capital letter and the separating comma are key
to this formula.) The project leveraged to the fullest extent possible the potential
data "points" that could be safely assigned without human intervention.

The next step was to fill in each person record with whatever data could not be
populated through the automated process described above. This includes first and
foremost life dates, place of birth, place of death, name components (e.g., surname,
married name, and nicknames), and occupation. PFE controls the expression of
all of this data by standardizing it as has been noted. For example, a birthdate of
"the 1st of January in 1783" is not searchable in the way that 1783-01-01 is. The use
of a prescribed date format (YYYY-MM-DD) that adheres to the International
Organization for Standardization (or ISO), means dates are uniform and searchable.

PFE looked to external controlled vocabularies when addressing the variety of
occupations practiced during the Founding era. This choice was made because
occupations are not referred to in the same way across all of the biographical
sources, nor are all still practiced. There were concerns that users of PFE
would not be able to query the data for occupations in a meaningful way without the
application of some form of standardized vocabulary, or taxonomy, to describe the
occupations represented in the data. PFE has over 1,400 unique occupations.

PFE turned to a freely available taxonomy called Human Relations Area Files
(HRAF) to create its controlled occupational vocabulary. The primary advantage HRAF
provides is its broad spectrum of generic descriptive categories: these
classifications obviate the need to define occupations no longer practiced. For
instance, HRAF's super- and sub-categories classify a "cradler" as someone active in
agriculture, and more specifically, tillage. These categories can be used to filter
the search results.

Research

In many cases we know a good deal about a person from the documentary editions that
provide extensive biographical content. Some of these people can be found in prominent
biographical dictionaries such as the Dictionary of American Biography, the
Dictionary of Virginia Biography, or the Biographical Directory of the
United States Congress. Consulting these resources enables us to fill in much of
the data right at the start. In thousands of cases, however, the factual data we have
from the editions is limited because the person named is peripheral to the edition or
little is known about the person. In these cases we must do additional research to
fill in the gaps. In order to do this, PFE has turned to the plethora of
resources available online. The increasing digitization of both primary sources and
historical scholarship provides an excellent opportunity to cull quickly and easily
material that would once have required hours of labor and countless miles of travel to
collect. Far-reaching projects such as Google Books have placed thousands of
monographs at the fingertips of scholars, while more directed efforts such as
America's Historical Newspapers provide in one place entire collections of historical
media. Likewise, the Internet plays host to the work of generations of genealogists,
with both reproductions of nineteenth-century texts and contemporary databases such as
Ancestry.com available for view. These kinds of sources, with their focus on family
instead of on historical prominence, contain information about many figures otherwise
absent from the record. Wikipedia, although not considered authoritative by
some, is fairly reliable for well-known individuals, and it leads us to external
sources. Many people in PFE do not appear in Wikipedia.

Starting from the material provided by the editors, as well as clues in the Founding
Fathers' letters themselves, PFE's staff have used these digital resources to
expand what is known about the PFE population. As with any historical
undertaking, it has been our responsibility to weigh the reliability of the material
we encounter online. In our research, credence is given first to the editors' work and
other academic efforts, such as American National Biography, over the
less-well-cited works of amateurs and family historians. When faced with conflicting
factual data from the documentary editions, the most frequently cited value is
used.

Beyond the information the project has collected about this population's individuals,
PFE also seeks to build connections between them. As noted above,
prosopography explores a society's interrelations to build a picture of how it
functioned. This first version of PFE focuses primarily on kinship connections
to provide an idea of the structure and connections between the era's most significant
families. To this end, we have also added family members not mentioned in Rotunda's
Founding Era Collection when we can find reliable sources providing information about
their lives and relations. Between the aggregation of biographical text, the
structuring of significant life data, and the construction of networks, PFE
seeks to provide users with a variety of perspectives from which to view the material
collected in People of the Founding Era.

Acknowledgments

This project would not have been possible without the significant support spanning the years 2008-2016 from the Andrew W.
Mellon Foundation. The editors wish to thank Senior Program Officer for Scholarly Communications at Mellon,
Donald J. Water, for his support. Many people have contributed to the success of PFE. For their oversight,
management, and data-herding skills, project managers Martin Kane, Trevor Hiblar, and Chris Martin. For their
help in originating the project concept, we thank Jean Bauer, Mary MacNeil, and Susan Severtson. People who
helped at the University of Virginia include Sara Lee Barnes, Alison Booth, Worthy Martin, and Daniel Pitti.
We have many individuals from documentary editing and other projects to thank including: David Mattern and
John Stagg (James Madison Papers), David Hoth, Ed Lengel, and Jennifer Stertzer (George Washington Papers),
C. James Taylor (Papers of John Adams), Connie Schulz and Mary Sherrer (Pinckney Papers), Susan Spengler (Jefferson
Papers: Retirement Series), Daniel Preston, Cassandra Good, and Heidi Stello (Monroe Papers), David Rawson
(Virginia Printers), Peter Kastor (Creating a Federal Government), and Tom Costa (Geography of Slavery). At
the Massachusetts Historical Society we thank Ondine LeBlanc and Nancy Heywood. At Poplar Forest we thank Wayne
Gannaway and Travis McDonald. At Monticello we thank Christa Dierksheide. At Highland we thank Sara
Bon-Harper. Harold Short and Jonathan Bradley at King's College London have been supportive of this project
from the outset.

Thanks to the staff of IDM including Jason Bush, Paul Hayslett, Helen Langone, and Allan Orsnes. Many thanks as always to Stephen Perkins of Infoset. We would not have got this project off the ground without them. The same is also true for the staff of Rotunda at the University of Virginia Press, including Jason Coleman, Tim Finney, Mark Saunders, David Sewell, Shannon Shiflett, and the Press's former director Penny Kaiserlian. We are especially thankful to Bill Womack for his superb design of PFE that truly brings it to life.